Parallel world Manga Artist-Chapter 214: Public Opinion
The ending song faded away.
Yet a vast number of Arcane fans across Japan remained deeply immersed in the story, unable to pull themselves back to reality.
For more than ten episodes, this series had shown the audience how "bad" Jinx was, how destructive, how troublesome she seemed. Aside from a fragile attachment to family, she barely resembled a normal human being.
But this episode told viewers something entirely different:
A person’s fate is shaped by their environment.
In another timeline, Jinx never experienced the death of her adoptive father. She never lost her sister Vi.
She grew up normally, bright, gentle, and whole.
In that world, she and Ekko would eventually become lovers, instead of meeting on a bridge as enemies, beating each other bloody as they had in the first season.
"And Ekko... I’m crying. If I were him, I wouldn’t go back."
"This timeline is absolutely the most perfect world for Ekko. His foster father is alive, and he’s with Jinx. But... it’s not his world. In the world he truly belongs to, the Undercity is still facing Piltover’s military invasion, and his best friend Vi is still fighting alone."
"After Episode 6, I thought Jayce was a complete monster. After Episode 7, I cried. He saw the truth, entire timelines where Piltover and Zaun were completely destroyed and devoured by Viktor’s hextech runes. That’s why he killed his brother the moment he returned."
"But why did it have to come to that? Are hextech runes really that twisted?"
"For the detailed explanation, check Shirogane’s article on his account. He explains that the continent Piltover is on once experienced a Rune War. Heimerdinger personally witnessed the devastation caused by runes, that’s why he desperately tried to stop Jayce and the others from researching them. It’s just... sigh."
"Watching this now, I realize something. No good deed is completely free of selfishness, and no evil deed is purely selfish either. Everyone just has a different standpoint, there’s no absolute right or wrong."
"I criticize Jayce, but if I were him, I might be even more ruthless. Would you kill your brother to save an entire city?"
"If I were Jinx, after everything she went through, I’d probably be even crazier than her."
"And if I were Ambessa, I’d be even more ruthless. If she couldn’t get the technology she wanted in Piltover, she’d be wiped out by the Black Rose the moment she returned to Noxus."
"In the end... I realized the clown was myself."
"Same. Last week, I enjoyed cursing Jayce the most. This week, I just feel he had no easy choices."
"But what I admire most is Shirogane’s imagination. How does someone even come up with a multiverse setting like this? With just one concept, the public opinion around Jinx and Jayce flipped completely."
"Jinx’s reputation was never that bad, though. Even in Season 1, a lot of people spoke up for her. But compared to now? This is a complete reversal."
All night long, the Arcane online forums remained ablaze.
Meanwhile, many staff members at Ion TV Station were so excited that they couldn’t sleep at all.
They were insiders.
They knew the numbers.
The next morning, when Modu TV Station officially announced that Episode 7 of Arcane Season 2 had achieved a viewership rating of 7.03%, the entire Japanese animation industry fell silent.
After the initial shock, most professionals could only sigh inwardly.
After all, if only one or two works achieved such results, people could still dismiss Shirogane as a temporary phenomenon, a lucky hit who happened to align with the market.
Popular animations appeared every year.
But how many works had it been now?
Each new project outperformed the last. Popularity continued to rise instead of decline.
Producing two animations with viewership ratings exceeding 7% within just two years, what more was there to say?
In the manga industry, Hunter × Hunter’s tankōbon average sales had already reached No. 1 in Japan and sixth in history.
And in the animation industry...
Shirogane’s works had become synonymous with blockbusters and ratings dominance, completely unrivaled in the Japanese market.
The same was largely true on a global scale.
This overwhelming performance even directly boosted the valuation and expectations of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, an anime that hadn’t even finished production yet.
Although the performance of Arcane, One-Punch Man, and Hunter × Hunter, Rei’s three most representative works, was already astonishing, it was still difficult to imagine any new animation truly surpassing them.
But what if it did?
Even if Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba achieved only 80% to 90% of the results of those three works, it would still qualify as a global blockbuster.
When someone proves their strength again and again, their reputation and status within the industry rise at an astonishing pace.
By this point, no one dared to describe Rei with the prefix "nineteen-year-old boy" anymore.
Capital moved faster than words.
Various investment groups across Japan proactively approached Rei like sharks that had caught the scent of blood.
For Demon Slayer, a project that had only just entered full production, numerous Japanese advertisers offered astonishingly high placement fees.
Several mobile game planning departments, each with annual revenues in the billions, came knocking, hoping to establish content collaborations. They planned to launch co-branded skins, characters, and items timed precisely to ride the wave of the anime’s broadcast popularity next year.
Many of them hadn’t even read the Demon Slayer script.
Yet they still chose to place blind trust in Rei, offering prices that were, by industry standards, outright absurd.
Domestic broadcasting rights for Demon Slayer quickly became the subject of competition among several major Japanese television stations.
As for overseas broadcasting rights, companies that had previously worked with Rei proactively reached out to inquire about authorization prices.
The market became fervently enthusiastic.
Even a rough calculation showed that if all these collaborations were accepted, the Demon Slayer anime, before a single episode aired, and before any merchandise went on sale, would not only recover its full production costs, but generate enormous profits.
Even Rei himself felt the situation was a little exaggerated.
But there was no doubt.
This was a good thing for Demon Slayer.
Although the early plot of the work was somewhat formulaic, its overall quality was well above the industry’s passing line.
The more attention it received before its broadcast, the easier it would be for the anime to push through its early, weaker phase of popularity.
Over the following days, Rei began handling these matters one by one.
He did not reject reasonable collaborations.
However, any party hoping to gamble on Demon Slayer’s post-broadcast popularity through profit-sharing or speculative contracts was flatly refused.
Rei had no intention of gambling on terms that allowed others to exploit uncertainty.
He was confident that the anime’s initial popularity would be extraordinarily high.
In the following week, the Hunter × Hunter manga plot advanced to a crucial stage.
The Hunter Association finally obtained information about the escaped Gon and Killua and began taking the Chimera Ant species’ invasion of the human world seriously.
At the same time, Gon and Killua entered a new phase of special training, preparing to grow stronger before returning to rescue Kite.
Meanwhile, in Arcane.
After the seventh episode, nearly all of the early foreshadowing laid throughout the series had been fully unveiled.
The long-anticipated war finally began.
Ambessa, whose ambitions had surfaced in Episode 6, openly revealed her goal: a dictatorial and violent rule over both Piltover and Zaun.
Her actions forced the people of the two cities, long divided, to unite in resistance.
At the same time, within another storyline, Viktor, who had been struck by Jayce’s cannon, appeared not to be dead after all.
Taking advantage of the chaos of battle, he arrived at the hextech core of the Hexgates and confronted Jayce directly.
